NS-3-based 5G Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Network Simulator

The Fifth-Generation of Mobile Communications (5G) is intended to satisfy the growing needs of users which can be summarised in the ability to access good quality services anywhere and at any time. Those needs can be supported by the integration of satellites in 5G systems due to the unique characteristics of satellites in terms of higher coverage, reliability, and availability. To minimize blind exploitation of new systems, new technologies should be verified and enhanced before being implemented to reduce the required cost and time. Creating a System Level Simulator (SLS) is an excellent way to evaluate new ideas and test novel systems. In this work, we present an open-source SLS based on the software Network Simulator 3 (NS-3). This tool allows simulating 5G Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Networks (STIN) and overcomes the state-of-the-art solutions by supporting Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) handover decisions, dynamic BandWidth Part (BWP) selection, and Component Carrier (CC) configurations based on different defined traffic profiles.